personal essays washington post

Be Heard: Where to Submit Essays Related to Current Events

June 5, 2020.

Hello, friends! As lovers and publishers of creative nonfiction we’re aware that, right now, it’s so important to express ourselves through words. As writers, putting pen to paper is how we move forward, either to help ourselves or others understand things more clearly or to speak the truth and influence change. While some might be journaling privately, others may be urgently submitting their stories to lit mags, websites, dailies, and more.

Hippocampus publishes our regular issues bi-monthly; as of today, that means our next issue is our July/August 2020 issue.

But… much of the work being created now needs to be heard NOW.

As we aren’t the right outlet for a timely piece, we wanted to point our readers/submitters to places where their submissions will get more immediate attention, whether literary magazines or outlets that publish personal essays more frequently, even daily, or to special calls for submissions, either for special issues or forthcoming anthologies.

Curated Lists of Opps from Our Friends Around the Web

Other publications and outlets have spent time creating lists and curating opps, so we’d like to link directly to their work:

Submittable created a COVID-19 Creative Calls for Submission , which seems to be updated to add new content as they find it; multigenre.
The New York Times article, “12 Ideas for Writing Through the Pandemic” includes some submission info
We’ll continue to add to this list as we find resources or receive suggestions

Literary Magazines & Other Publications: Specific Calls

COVID Lit – various genres/forms (rolling submissions)
“For this issue, we want to examine the truths and the lies that we’re uncovering amid this global pandemic. With this call, we seek to elevate the already and the always, the ordinary and the overlooked.” — from the submission guidelines
The Syndrome Magazine – Black Voices Matter – submissions from women/non-binary writers – deadline June 30
Uncomfortable Revolution – seeking timely articles/stories on the intersection of pop culture, disability, race, and ethnicity. (rolling submissions)
The HerStories Project – GenX women and impact of COVID-19 – June 30 deadline
essays, poems, and art, “… that amplify the experiences of Black and African American writers in American society.” — from the guidelines
“Art as resistance is not naïve or futile—it is bold and courageous. It embraces that which makes us human—our love, our anger, and our passion.” — from the guidelines
Allegory Ridge – open to personal essays with the theme “Grow” (complete or pitch) – deadline June 12
Vessel – op-eds (complete or pitch) – (rolling submissions)
“…Queer Loving while also elevating Black and queer voices and creating a space of love, courage, and solidarity…” – from the guidelines
PlanPhilly/WHYY – op-eds (Philadelphia-related) for the Eyes on the Street Section – (rolling submissions)
Policy Network (based in Europe) – op-eds/articles for new series, Aftershock: Society and Politics After the Pandemic
Longreads – current themes include Life in the Time of Covid and Amplify: Stories of Racism in America
Entropy – new series, Food and COVID-19 (rolling submissions for now)
T MI Project – COVID-related submisions (rolling submissions for now)

National Publications & Other Outlets: General Rolling Submissions

These publications traditionally accept personal essays, op-eds, and story pitches. (We linked to submissions pages where we could find them; others only list contact information.)

How to submit an op-ed
Inspired Life
Boston Globe (essays, op-eds)
General submissions
Guardian Opinion
Vox First Person
Business Insider (op-eds and personal essays)
HuffPost Personal
Well + Good
New York/The Cut
Toward Freedom
Various Outlets , the Op-Ed Project offers a database of papers and pubs that accept opinion submissions
Medium publications , various – explore the many editorial publications at Medium that are open for submissions

Miscellaneous

Our suggestions are geared toward personal essays/literary CNF because that’s our main audience, but because we’re sharing this post on social media, we know a broader audience might see this. So we also wanted to include ideas for other ways to publish work/share your voice:

An op-ed to your local or regional newspaper
An op-ed to a local, independent online news publication
A letter or story pitch to your alumni magazine or college publications (if they are publishing online during the summer)

If you’re working on something super-timely, we hope that this list of resources is helpful in finding your words a home. Hippocampus Magazine is always open to simultaneous submissions, so you may also submit work to us and withdraw it if it’s accepted elsewhere.

Special Note About Our July/August 2020 Issue

Right now, Hippocampus Magazine is selecting and finalizing pieces for the July/August issue. Typically, we have a 3-4 month lead time to review submissions, since we read pieces in the order that we receive them. However, given the gravity of the moment and the urgency and necessity of writing that reflects the world as it truly is, we plan to keep a close eye on more recent submissions as well.

(If you know of another opportunity not listed here, you can share it with us in the comments; we’ll try to update this post to add new suggestions, elevating them from the comments.)

P.S. Additional Opportunities (related, but longer-term deadlines)

While not timely in the sense of being published within the next few weeks, the following are related calls for submissions for magazines, special projects, and anthologies; we discovered them in our search and thought we should still share them here:

805 Lit + Art – special 19th Amendment/Black Women Issue (August 2020) – deadline June 7
Flash Nonfiction COVID-19 : 73 Short, True Stories from the Front Lines of the Pandemic (publishes fall 2020) – deadline June 30
CATALYST ( from Prevention at the Intersections, debut issue, Sept. 2020) – Mind, Body & Gender theme – deadline July 31
Being Home: An Essay Anthology – Madville Publishing – deadline August 1
About Place Journal – Works of Resistance, Resilience (for fall issue) – deadline August 1
We’ll continue to add to this list as we spot opps or receive suggestions

IMAGE CREDIT: Flickr Creative Commins/ Pierre Metivier

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We accept letters by email and surface mail; however, because timeliness is a critical factor in the selection of letters we publish, we strongly encourage submissions by email. Submit via our online form . Letters to the Editor may also be sent to [email protected] or to: Letters to the Editor, The Washington Post, 1301 K Street NW, Washington DC 20071

What are the guidelines for letter submissions?

We prefer letters that are fewer than 400 words and take as their starting point an article or other item appearing in The Post. Letters must be the author’s original work, and may not be generated or edited by artificial intelligence tools. They may not have been submitted to, posted to or published by any other publication, including your personal social media accounts. They must include the writer's full name; anonymous letters and letters written under pseudonyms will not be considered. For verification purposes, they must also include the writer's home address, email address and telephone numbers, including a daytime telephone number. Writers should disclose any personal or financial interest in the subject matter of their letters. If sending an email, please put the text of the letter in the body and do not send attachments; attachments will not be read.

How are letters selected for publication?

The Post receives thousands of letters each week. Letters editor Alyssa Rosenberg looks for letters that offer a new perspective or add depth to the discussion of an issue; surprise and delight our readers; or raise useful and intriguing questions about the Post’s practices.

Are letters edited?

Letters are edited for clarity and to comply with The Post’s style and standards, fact-checked and sometimes trimmed to fit the space available in the newspaper. The opinions expressed are always the writer's own. We confer with letter writers about editing to the extent that deadlines allow.

When will I hear about my letter?

We do our best to read all letters promptly. Because of the volume of submissions we receive, we are not able to respond to letters not chosen for publication. If you haven't heard from a Post staff member within two weeks, it's safe to assume your letter won't be published. If you decide to withdraw a letter submitted to The Post, please inform us promptly by emailing [email protected].

Where can I find letters to the editor on washingtonpost.com?

Go to washingtonpost.com/opinions/letters-to-the-editor

You might also be interested in: How do I submit an op-ed?

Fifteen Excellent Personal Essays to Read this Week...

Welcome to Memoir Land —a newsletter edited by Sari Botton , now featuring three verticals:

Memoir Monday , a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively , The Rumpus , Granta , Guernica , Oldster Magazine , Literary Hub , Orion Magazine , The Walrus , and Electric Literature . Below is this week’s curation.

First Person Singular , featuring original personal essays. Recently I published “ On Silence (or, Speak Again) ” by Elissa Bassist . A new essay is coming soon.

*Submissions are currently paused for First Person Singular. I’ll do a limited submission period this fall. Stay tuned…*

The Lit Lab , featuring interviews and essays on craft and publishing. It is primarily for paid subscribers . Recently I published the second installment of “ The Prompt-O-Matic ” series.

Memoir Monday is a reader-supported publication that pays contributors for original essays and interviews. To support this work, become a paid subscriber.

Essays from partner publications…

Maternal vertigo: on chaos, childcare, and civilizational collapse, by molly lynch.

“Sometime in the early weeks after becoming a mother, it occurred to me that by giving birth to a baby I’d also given birth to chaos. I don’t mean that my child embodied chaos. It was more like when the baby exited my body, a dark, swarming force rushed in. By wanting to protect someone, I’d invited into my life all that I could never protect him from. I’ve since thought that part of what changes you when you become a parent has to do with the way you encounter this contradiction: at the very moment that you take on the greatest act of caring, you discover how powerless you are.”

A Boat Ride to the Confluence of the Two Niles

By isma’il kushkush.

“Known as the longest kiss in history, al-Mugran is a place of natural beauty and romantic symbolism where the calm and clear waters of the White Nile from the south meet the muddier, darker and rushing waters of the Blue Nile from the east. Al-Mugran’s name comes from Arabic for ‘the junction’ or ‘the confluence’, where, after ‘kissing’, the differently colored battling currents remain visible before flowing united.”

In Defense of Sophie Turner, It’s Nearly Impossible to Be a “Good Mother

By alicia andrzejewski.

“Generations of bad mothers have taught me that, no matter what Turner may or may not have been caught doing on a Ring camera, the dictates of motherhood are painful—violent, even—to bear. Sophie Turner has privileges many mothers cannot even imagine and yet even she cannot escape these narratives, cannot measure up to what patriarchy deems a good, successful mother.”

The Forest Clearing

By yomi wrong.

“I feel pulled to a clearing. Now I’m distracted. I have an urgency to explore. When we break to go off wandering, I bolt in the direction that calls me. Rolling up a slope, my wheels struggle to grip the forest floor, and I panic, fearing I’ll get stuck. Keep going.”

Burning it Down

By joy castro.

“Since my late twenties, when my hair began to go silver, I’d colored it assiduously, like all the women in my family—like all the Latinas I knew. Dark hair was a marker of identity, of youth, of femininity, of our culture.” ( Editor’s note: This essay was featured when it first was published in 2022. Re-upping now because it received notable mention in The Best American Essays 2023, edited by Vivian Gornick. )

What It Took to Write the Personal Essay That’s Setting the Web on Fire

By jesse sposato.

“Every once in a while I start reading a story and know right away that it’s going to be the kind of piece that truly grabs me and allows the rest of the world to fall away while I read. Jenisha Watts’s new essay for The Atlantic , ‘ I Never Called Her Momma: My childhood in a crack house ,’ is one of those stories. And I wasn’t alone — the entire internet has been ablaze with words of adoration since the essay was first published earlier this month.” ( Editor’s note: This is not an essay, but an interview about one, which was featured in this newsletter two weeks ago. )

Essays from around the web…

By cristina olivetti.

“There are so many lasts we don’t remember. I don’t remember the last time Graham drove the S-80...I do know I kept the car for a while after Graham could no longer drive it. You can ask my friends—I drove Ludicrous for all of them. But it wasn’t that fun. People felt nauseous and knocked around. I get it. They weren’t falling apart like we were, so that thin disintegrating feeling wasn’t exactly hilarious for them...”

by Sydney Lea

“One event marred the celebration when I was ten. Just before lunch, I climbed a big rock and put my hand on a copperhead snake that had been warming winter out of its system at the flattened top. I remember to this day how intensely painful its bite was. After a rattling trip in Dad’s ’48 Chevy wagon to a doctor’s office in a postage stamp-sized town nearby, I was injected with anti-venin and, the poisonous bite’s only memorable effect, apart from that pain, was a stiff neck for ten hours or so. I do recall that I’d never loved my father as much as I did each time I woke up; there he’d faithfully be right through till dawn, squinting in the half-light at some magazine, his chair barely rocking.”

Just a Normal Girl, Hiding From the Building Inspector

By micaela macagnone.

“I was 15 the first time it happened…I was staring at the empty apartment and wondering what would happen if the police figured out what my dad had done…For years, my family had been living in a commercial building — illegal for residential use — above my father’s Pilates studio. He had opened it in 1998 at Scheffel Hall, a New York City landmark on Third Avenue dating to 1895.”

So Fierce Is the World: On Loneliness and Philip Seymour Hoffman

By richard deming.

“The desolation of loneliness, like the connected problems of substance abuse and depression, comes from the feeling that the experience—when one is in it —will never end. That is why, sometimes, people choose to end it for themselves. If we are to keep going, push through, or slip around it, I believe we must reinvent loneliness in order to survive it. I have been trying to do this my whole life.” (h/t The Small Bow .)

SuperBabies Don’t Cry

By heather lanier.

“Here’s the thing. If you buy into a false narrative that the body is controllable, that illness can always be prevented, then by proxy you are left with a disturbing, damaging, erroneous conclusion: the belief that a person’s disability is their fault.”

How to Prepare for A Difficult Conversation

By ethan gilsdorf.

“Conjure the person with whom you need to discuss this urgent matter—the spouse, the sibling, the in-law, the outlaw, the ex-, the coworker, the offspring, the former best friend, the dead parent. It’s simple. Watch their drooping face, age spots, shaky jaw, deliberate way of speaking, how they hide behind their sunglasses and never make eye contact, and let it all enter the crenellations of your agitated brain.”

The Power of the Cookie

By blair glaser.

“I didn’t want any more cookies. They wouldn’t be warm. They wouldn’t include Ava’s ironic presence. What I could take was the mutual hope we had given each other just by living our lives, and the incredible reflection that all that grueling personal work I did to heal had actually inspired someone else without me doing anything except eating one cookie: the cookie that would change my life.”

When Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Part

By dr. tamara mc.

“We couldn't learn how to stand up for ourselves, setting us up for a lifetime of abuse. This is what fundamentalist communities teach girls. Because our bodies belonged to our parents, church, and eventually our husbands, they never belonged to us. The title of the Duggar docuseries includes the word "secrets," but I hope by now it's no surprise that fundamentalist religious environments can be the grimiest of all. Despite the Duggars' squeaky-clean appearance and our contrasting grubby one, we both shared dark secrets.”

How We Carry the Weight of It

By will mcmillan.

“We arrive in the raspberry fields when it’s dark. It’s dark when we pile out of our secondhand pickup. My father, my mother. My brother and me. It’s dark when we start walking the rutted, sopping dirt road that cuts through the field, where we meet and melt into a vast sea of bodies, the dozens of families who’ve piled out of their secondhand pickups, their cars. All of us merging, ambling forward, a sleepy, reluctant, unremarkable herd. All of us, in the dark.”

🚨Announcements:

📢 submissions for narratively ’s second annual memoir prize are open now..

“From Tuesday, September 26, 2023, through Thursday, November 30, 2023, Narratively is accepting entries for our 2023 Memoir Prize. We’re on the hunt for revealing and emotional first-person nonfiction narratives from unique and overlooked points of view. The winning submission will receive a $3,000 prize and publication on Narratively.”

Learn more at Narratively

📢 Take my Skillshare workshop on blending the individual and the collective in your essays!

Take Sari Botton's SkillShare Workshop

📢 Attention Publications and writers interested in having published essays considered for inclusion in our weekly curation:

By Thursday of each week, please send to [email protected]:

The title of the essay and a link to it.

The name of the author, and the author’s Twitter handle.

A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.

Because of data limits for many email platforms, going forward we will only include artwork from our partner publications. No need to send art.

*Please be advised, however, that we cannot accept all submissions, nor respond to the overwhelming number of emails received. Also, please note that we don’t accept author submissions from our partner publications.

You can also support Memoir Monday—and indie bookstores!—by browsing this Bookshop.org list of every book that’s been featured at the Memoir Monday reading series. It’s a great place to find some new titles to add to your TBR list!

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?

The Ultimate Guide to Writing For The Washington Post

The Washington Post is in some ways a very traditional newspaper-style publication, and in other ways it is refreshingly modern.

Often known as WaPo, the Washington Post started life as a newspaper in 1877. Throughout the decades, it has evolved to keep up with the times. These days, as of about 2013, the publication is owned by a company that itself is owned by Jeff Bezos, making it part of the tertiary empire of data controlled by the Amazon mastermind.

Unlike many of the other publications I cover on this site – like The Guardian or Inc.com – The Washington Post makes their submission process fairly transparent. You can write several different kinds of content and pitch it to different sections, and have several good avenues for getting your credit on their pages.

First up: read the site.

Before you even begin trying to write a pitch or an article for WaPo, the first thing you should be doing is reading the site. The Washington Post is a pretty huge publication, covering hundreds of articles a day on a wide variety of topics, so you have your homework cut out for you.

I’m not telling you to read everything in the newspaper, of course. If you’re in Washington DC and you can read the paper version each day, that’s fine. I wouldn’t call it necessary, but it can give you a good idea of what the top-level content is and what they most want to cover.

No, what you should do is look through the huge list of categories the site covers, and find those that most fit with your content. For many of you, I assume that’s going to be in the tech, business, lifestyle, or opinions sections. Other sections, like photography, politics, sports, or arts can be useful targets as well. Some, like obituaries, crosswords, podcasts, and national news are unlikely to be good targets.

Remember that the Washington Post is a newspaper with a large staff of their own journalists. Whenever I write a post about how to pitch content to a newspaper, the first thing I mention is that you aren’t going to fit in with or replace an existing journalist. The turnaround time it takes to receive your pitch, vet you as an author, and get a post written is such that trying to cover breaking news is just not going to happen. Staff writers will be able to cover it better than you can, faster than you can. By the time the editors even look at your pitch, chances are good the current event you’re covering is not current anymore.

Let’s step a way from politics and news, then, and look at a section you might consider pitching: business. The Washington Post’s organizational structure works like a category feed. You have the Business section, and within it you have four sub-sections: Health Care, Leadership, Personal Finance, and Small Business. If you click the main Business headline , you’ll see content from all of those sections, as well as a flag at the top indicating that the business section is in partnership with Bloomberg.

You might also notice that a good portion of the business-related content is still political in nature. This is going to be the case pretty much everywhere, because the Post is based in DC, and DC is the capitol of political importance. So you see business articles covering, say, Trump’s trade war, while also seeing posts about Netflix pricing and robotic “employees” at grocery stores .

Spend some time – a few weeks at minimum – reading content in the section you want to pitch. Pay attention to a few things.

When a post is political, what angle does it take? Does it lean more liberal or conservative? Is it explicit, or simply biased?
How much fact and how many sources are cited in the content? Are you expected to trust the author’s expertise, or read up further if you’re concerned?
What is the scope of the topics covered? Is it largely about global issues, national issues, or do local issues crop up as well?
What is the tone, perspective, and voice of the content? Should you write in a more personal style, or keep your content impersonal and factual?

One thing you may want to check is whether or not the content is syndicated. For example, virtually everything in the Small Business section is 1) not actually about small businesses, and 2) syndicated from Bloomberg. The chances of you being able to submit content to that section are fairly slim.

Eventually you’ll gain a feel for the kind of content published on the Washington Post and you’ll be ready to start laying the groundwork for publication.

Developing a Frame of Mind

While reading content, you should be formulating ideas that you may be able to pitch. This is good; write those ideas down and develop them into simple pitches. Even if they aren’t accepted at WaPo, you may be able to re-use them elsewhere later.

Prepare yourself for rejection. You won’t be able to submit a single pitch and get right in, especially if you don’t have industry contacts or a great reputation. Most likely, you’re going to end up facing several rejections before you hit upon something the editors like.

Try to develop topics that are in some way slightly controversial. I’m not saying you should write a post about how murder is actually a good thing, though. Think of a topic that subverts the usual discussion around that topic, or that brings light to an issue that plagues your industry in a unique way. A bog-standard report on a common industry topic just won’t cut it.

Read the Guidelines

At some point, you always need to track down whatever guidelines a site has for submission ahead of time.

Here’s the page for the Washington Post . Basically:

Don’t submit anything that’s inappropriate. No violence, no libel, no pornography, no violations of laws or privacy, no copyright violations, and so on. Importantly, no solicitation, no advertising, and no misrepresentation of your affiliations.
You give WaPo the rights to use content you submit.

It’s all fairly standard, and you can read through the whole thing in a few minutes. If you’ve submitted content to any site before, it’s pretty much the same stuff you’ve seen everywhere.

You should also read their rules about ethics and conflicts of interest. Most of this is aimed at journalists rather than freelance contributors, but it’s still worth giving a look, just in case.

Picking a Submission Method

There are several ways you can submit content and have it show up on the Washington Post itself. Let’s go over each of them.

First up, you have the paid experience. The Washington Post has something called BrandStudio , which is their paid advertising platform. You can become an advertiser and create immersive content that is put in front of the WaPo audience. Of course, it’s expensive, and it’s probably out of reach for most of you. If you have a heck of an advertising budget – and don’t mind paying for sponsored content rather than hoping for a free guest post – you can look into this option.

Next, you can submit a correction. Now, this is a bit of a backdoor strategy and it’s very much not guaranteed to work. Corrections in a newspaper are generally used to correct facts, like a mis-quote, the wrong date for an event, or an incorrect attribution.

Instead, you can find a controversial article in your industry and submit a correction on the factual basis of the article premise. If you’re in luck, the editor will invite you to write your own perspective on the issue. Most of the time, though, you just won’t be given the time of day.

A third option is to submit a press release . Obviously, a press release is very different from a guest post, but a press release is also something that should go through its own channels. Indeed, each department has its own process for handling press releases, so you need to call and talk to the people in that department specifically.

A probably better option is to submit a letter to the editor . A letter to the editor is a public piece ostensibly aimed at the editor, but really aimed at the audience of the publication. It’s not quite a blog post; it’s more aimed at personal opinions and experiences from people who have a position worth telling. Often, letters to the editor are used as a way to show perspectives the mainline journalists won’t, though that’s not always a good thing.

The process for submitting a letter is to actually submit a letter. They have an email address specifically for them. They prefer letters that are very short, under 200 words, that are unique and that are based on an existing published piece on the site. Think of it like an expansive blog comment.

Your next option is to submit an op-ed . An op-ed is a story usually positioned across – or on the opposite page – from the editorials section in the paper itself. Online, it’s more of an essay from an outside contributor that is supported by facts and evidence. You know, standard blog post stuff for flagship content. You’re not thinking of writing non-flagship content for a major publication, are you?

Op-eds on WaPo are limited to about 800 words. They only look at completed articles, not pitches, and they don’t give feedback. They ignore anything that’s not under your real name, so make sure you’re disclosing who you are. Disclose any financial or business ties you have with the subject as well.

Another option may be to submit a local opinion essay . I’m hesitant to suggest this one because I’m not sure whether this form is still in use or if it just goes to a dead inbox. Still, it might be worth giving a shot. Unlike other contact methods, this one has a form to fill out instead of an email address to contact.

The Washington Post also maintains a talent network. You can create a profile here . Not all profiles are accepted, though, so make sure to put your best foot forward.

How does the talent network work? Basically, when tips or pitches come in that no one is willing or has the time to write, editors will assign it to someone with the relevant expertise within the talent network. You do the research and write the post, and they publish it. They even pay you for your contribution! Often times, if you pitch a guest post through another means and are accepted, you will also be invited to apply to the talent network with a near-guaranteed acceptance. This can open you up to a lot of future posting opportunities, as well as the money.

On top of all of this – you see why I’m liking WaPo compared to some of the harder to contact publications? – you can actually just apply for a freelance writer job with the Washington Post. They post jobs on this page regularly, and they occasionally pick from this pool. This isn’t a great option if you just want a guest post, though, so I don’t really recommend it.

As a final option, you can do the usual process I recommend for most sites. Track down the managing or deputy editors for the section you want to write for, and do the whole influencer networking thing. Follow them on Twitter, engage with them off of WaPo, and familiarize yourself with their desires. Pitch your content directly to them, and you’ll have a better chance of getting accepted.

With all of these different options available to you, how can you possibly lose?

Written by James Parsons

James is the founder and CEO of Topicfinder , a purpose-built topic research tool for bloggers and content marketers. He also runs a content marketing agency, Content Powered, and writes for Forbes, Inc, Entrepreneur, Business Insider, and other large publications. He's been a content marketer for over 15 years and helps companies from startups to Fortune 500's get more organic traffic and create valuable people-first content.

How to Start Guest Blogging for The New York Times

5 Steps to Publishing a Guest Post on The Guardian

How to Follow Up on Guest Post Pitches Without Being Annoying

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Topicfinder is designed by a content marketing agency that writes hundreds of longform articles every month and competes at the highest level. It’s tailor-built for competitive content teams, marketers, and businesses.

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Autman personal essay appears in the washington post.

Portrait of Samuel Autman, associate prof of English

Samuel Autman, associate professor of English, has written a personal essay describing how he learned that his student loans had been forgiven. “I thought I might die with these debts,” he wrote. See his essay in The Washington Post .

Posted on: January 27, 2022

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Introducing HuffPost Opinion And HuffPost Personal

Editor in Chief, HuffPost

We live in a cacophonous world. Thousands of voices shout for our attention from our social media timelines and TV screens. It’s hard to know what deserves our focus and what to tune out. At HuffPost, we believe it’s our job to bring you, our audience, the most thoughtful, diverse and provocative points of view from across the globe. So today we are launching two new sections: Opinion and Personal.

The new Opinion section will feature a mix of regular columnists and one-off guest writers, commissioned by our Opinion editors to produce smart, authentic, timely and rigorous op-eds. Our goal is to help our audience better understand the breakneck news cycle, and shed light on stories that aren’t getting enough attention. We will feature these columnists’ bylines prominently across the site, so that you will come to recognize a set of smart, reliable voices you can come back to again and again.

For example, today we are featuring Carol Anderson on the Republican agenda, Tressie McMillan Cottom on the complex challenges of the digital age, Lauren Sandler on the future of women’s leadership and Jamil Smith on why Trump’s racism makes him not only an immoral president but also an ineffective one. We are excited to welcome our slate of regular columnists, which will continue to grow and evolve.

The new Personal section will feature commissioned first-person essays by guest writers, as well as person-first content ― including features, Q&As and interviews written by HuffPost reporters ― exploring the experiences and lives of celebrities, newsmakers and “everyday” individuals.

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5 University of Washington Essay Examples by Accepted Students

What’s covered:, essay example #1 – diversity, cripplepunks, essay example #2 – diversity, community in difference, essay example #3 – diversity, food, essay example #4 – diversity, dinnertime conversations, essay example #5 – interdisciplinary studies, where to get your university of washington essays edited.

The University of Washington is a selective school, so it’s important to write strong essays to help your application stand out. In this post, we’ll share essays real students have submitted to the University of Washington. (Names and identifying information have been changed, but all other details are preserved).

Read our University of Washington es say breakdown to get a comprehensive overview of this year’s supplemental prompts.

Please note: Looking at examples of real essays students have submitted to colleges can be very beneficial to get inspiration for your essays. You should never copy or plagiarize from these examples when writing your own essays. Colleges can tell when an essay isn’t genuine and will not view students favorably if they plagiarized.

Prompt: Our families and communities often define us and our individual worlds. Community might refer to your cultural group, extended family, religious group, neighborhood or school, sports team or club, co-workers, etc. Describe the world you come from and how you, as a product of it, might add to the diversity of the University of Washington. (300 words)

The first time I looked up the term cripplepunk I was in ninth grade, almost bedbound with severe hip pain. It took half a second for the page to load, and another half a second for me to process what I was seeing. There before me, against the muted grey of my phone’s dark mode, is the community I thought I would never have. I could have scrolled for hours, absorbing the images of models in powerchairs wearing ornate gowns, snarky patches on guide dog vests, and decorated canes. I kept coming back to the page, enchanted with the movement. Although the term cripplepunk wasn’t used until 2014, the spirit of the movement is present in most disabled people, from Frida Kahlo to the participants in the Capitol Crawl. The cripplepunk movement is intentionally subversive, fighting against the ableism and pity that disabled people encounter at every turn. Cripplepunks take a “so what if I am?” approach to ableism, refusing to be ashamed of symptoms, accommodations, or mobility aids. It’s a diverse movement too, where a 60-something veteran dealing with decades-old injuries can guide me through the process of buying and decorating my first cane. In cripplepunk circles, a deafblind Black woman can teach the world that disabled people can have dreams for their futures. The cripplepunk movement is a movement where I can offer sympathy, advice, and support to the same people who helped me through otherwise isolating moments and new cripples alike. That work doesn’t just happen online though. My work as a cripplepunk happens everywhere, classrooms and grocery stores alike, by being visibly and unashamedly disabled, vocally confronting ableists, and campaigning for greater accessibility.

What the Essay Did Well

One of the primary strengths of this “Diversity” essay is its writer’s enthusiasm about the cripplepunk movement, which helps readers feel connected to them. At the very beginning of this response, we are introduced to the term ‘cripplepunk,’ but just like the student, we are not exactly sure what it means. We go through the process of learning about the movement with the student as they bring to our minds “images of models in powerchairs wearing ornate gowns, snarky patches on guide dog vests, and decorated canes.” By bringing us along to their first introduction to cripplepunk, this student forms a connection between themself and the reader. We get “enchanted” alongside them.

At the same time, we get enchanted by the student, who positions themself as mature and insightful. As they describe how the cripplepunk movement wasn’t labeled until 2014 but “the spirit of the movement” existed long before, they address the ways that community doesn’t need to have a name to exist. They position community as anything that makes individuals not feel alone, then follow that description up with a definition of community as “people who help others through otherwise isolating moments.” This deeper reflection displays this student’s insightful-nature and maturity.

Finally, this essay’s structure works very nicely. It is simultaneously anecdotal and reflective, and, to top it all off, the student provides an image of them in “classrooms and grocery stores alike” showing off their diversity and their pride. The anecdote draws the reader in, while the reflection reveals this student’s personality and perspectives. Combined, the reader gets a good idea of who this student is and how they would fit into the campus community.

What Could Be Improved

The one thing this essay didn’t address was how this student will add to the diversity of the University of Washington. Although we get a good sense of the unique community this student came from and how it shaped them, we still want to know how they will contribute to their campus community. This student could have easily revised the last few sentences to say something along the lines of this:

“I intend to bring the cripplepunk movement with me to the University of Washington. I’ll proudly display myself on campus so I can teach my fellow classmates about disabilities and encourage other disabled students to be unashamed of who they are.”

Reworking the conclusion to discuss how they will take the lessons they have learned from being part of the cripplepunk community and share those lessons with a new community would show admissions officers exactly what this student would bring to campus. It doesn’t have to be an extensive response, but the essay should include some reference of University of Washington.

In my youth, I found solace in communities of my peers who shared portions of my identity; from speaking the same second languages to sharing similar tastes, I was quick to bond with those I was similar to.

When I moved to Oregon, I found myself miles away from these connections. My fragmented identity found little to attach to my peers. Inkling connections uprooted as I attended three different middle schools throughout my years. “Community” felt like a bubble I was floating upon, inherently a part of yet never fully immersed.

At the end of math class towards the middle of eighth grade, I felt a tap on my shoulder. A tall girl with glasses and a tooth gap stood behind.

“Do you want to sit with us at lunch today?”

Stemming from this small invitation, I found myself part of a community of peers with whom I never thought I could relate. Our interests diverged and collided in all regards; we were of different gender identities, sexual orientations, and ethnic backgrounds. While I was the only person of color in our friend group, I cherished the different experiences we brought to the table. I recounted my struggles accepting my culture while I heard the stories of my friends who were dealing with gender dysphoria.

In the following years, I wholeheartedly applied this multifaceted outlook to my sense of community. I engaged with peers both different and similar to me; I found community at Indian festivals with my fellow South Asian peers and community with my closest friends with whom I can form strong emotional connections, despite our dissimilar backgrounds.

This ever-growing sense of community has helped me thrive and will better help me engage within the student body at the University of Washington

As this student explores the struggle of finding community, their essay not only reads like a Diversity essay but also like an Overcoming Challenges essay .

The main strength of this essay is the arc it presents. We learn about their background (moving around a lot) and we learn that community didn’t always come easy for them. The sentence “‘ Community’ felt like a bubble I was floating upon, inherently a part of yet never fully immersed” articulates their isolation particularly well. At the same time, this sentence shows their profound awareness of the true meaning of community. They understand that being a part of a formal group like a school organization, an ethnic group, or a sport does not necessarily mean one feels community.

As the essay progresses, the student comes to understand that community does not have to exist within any formal bounds at all. You can find community with people completely different from you. Through their reflection, this student clearly shows an understanding of the importance of diversity. Not only is this essay able to demonstrate the meaning of community to this student, but it also displays how diversity is an integral part of community, which is exactly what admissions officers want to see.

The beginning of this essay is a little slow, so the whole essay would benefit from reordering it and changing the structure a bit. Essays tend to start off with an anecdote to hook the reader and then go into more elaboration. However, it takes a few sentences before this student gets to their anecdote. We learn about this student’s experience feeling part of (or isolated from) a community prior to middle school, but the essay isn’t overly engaging before the anecdote.

The anecdote livens up the essay and brings a renewed sense of excitement and engagement to the reader, so opening the essay with the story of getting invited to lunch would spur that interest from the beginning. After the quick anecdote, the student could explain why it was so meaningful to be invited to lunch and find a community at that table because they had felt that they were missing a community throughout middle school. Restructuring the essay like this would mean it wouldn’t be told chronologically, but a deeper emotional connection with the student, and interest in their story, would be established off the bat.

“Beta, food is ready,” Amma yells as I quickly traverse her words. She made dosas and aloo curry, my favorite. I followed the strong, flavorful scent to the kitchen, the same place where I subsequently got serenaded by hymns sung by Amma. I helped set up the table, decorated with a box of misplaced cheerios and a bowl of Gulab jamun Appa set out for us before he left for work. I watched my brother go into the garden to collect one of our banana leaves, acting as plates for the eight guests arriving soon for lunch. The natural grassy smell that emanated from the leaves signaled Amma that guests would be coming soon. She laid out the dosas on the table and aloo in a bowl, exerting an ounce of pride from the squint of her eyes. The aroma of dosas and aloo curry has followed my family for generations. Every generation that was taught the art of making a dosa assimilated a new idea, evolving my family’s South Indian cuisine. My appreciation of my community lies within its versatility for the continuation of traditions and beliefs, passing them down for generations to come. Guests started coming in for lunch, holding their food, seasoned with the stories of their lives. Despite the incredible array of foods on the table, the box of cheerios remained in sight to the public. Like me, it didn’t align with the norms of its environment, but remained firm. Its bright yellow color pervaded, attracting many. However, it had its own stories and journey that couldn’t hold comparison to others. This “ambiguity” represents diversity within culture. Its multidimensional perspective allows for cuisine and culture to bring a multitude of stories together, creating a home for all, including me.

This essay exemplifies how to respond to the Diversity prompt, an essay archetype used by many colleges. Effective responses do just what this essay does, by describing both a culture and the applicant’s place within it. Especially successful essays convey important, relevant aspects of the community with quick yet evocative descriptions, like of the aloo curry and hymns, that also help readers get to know the applicant better. In this essay, we see their thoughtfulness, keen eye for detail, involvement with their family and community, and appreciation for their heritage.

One more especially powerful aspect of this essay is the vivid, descriptive language. There’s the smell of curry, the sound of singing, and the visual of the bright yellow Cheerios box, all of which draw us into this student’s world with all five senses. In particular, the metaphor of the Cheerios box standing out in the midst of the home-cooked, traditional South Indian meal is unexpected and heartwarming, and helps ensure that this rich essay will make a strong impression on UW admissions officers.

Even in a strong essay like this one, there’s still room for improvement. One thing that would make this supplement more effective would be a bit more detail on the central metaphor of the Cheerios box. Why does the author align themselves with the American breakfast cereal, instead of the food being cooked by their grandmother?

The description of the box as “not aligning with the norms of the environment” is compelling, but not supported by details about the applicant’s personality, or reflections on their identity. While metaphors are a crucial part of many college essays, you always want to be as explicit as possible about what a metaphor is saying about you, to ensure the admissions officer reading your essay fully understands your point.

Additionally, on a structural level, this essay would benefit from being split into two or even three paragraphs, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because one big block of text is a little rough on the eyes. Secondly, because breaking up your ideas ensures each one gets your reader’s full attention–at the end of each paragraph, they can reflect on the point you’ve just made before continuing on to the next one.

At my dining table, a silent war was being waged. Each side wielded glances, smirks, and snide remarks concealed under composed postures. The discomfort was palpable. Yet, newly eight-year-old me moved obliviously between my grandmas. To me, they were nearly the same person wh o loved me and, on this delightful occasion, had provided me with considerable compensation for lasting another year.

My first call to battle came sitting in the passenger seat of my grandma, Judy’s Toyota. As we rolled through the hills of Idaho, she spoke to me about a recent election and her opinions on various healthcare issues. Moved from a place of deep sorrow, she described my Aunt’s struggle to obtain insurance due to a pre-existing condition. She suggested her solutions, and I listened attentively, curious about her ideas since I had yet to form my own.

Months later, I found myself in a hammock under a sweeping eucalyptus, engaged in a similar discussion with my other grandma, Teresa. As a healthcare worker, she was very involved with the issue, yet her ideas fell completely opposite Judy’s.

This was when I discovered the origin of the hushed hostility afflicting my family.

The family I come from may seem divided with their vastly different views, but together, these women taught me the importance of being a listener. I learned that to understand an issue truly, you must first consider all thoughts and opinions, no matter how much you may disagree. The animosity I observed resulted from closed minds and echo chambers; from their discomfort, I’ve learned that progress can only be made through compromise and communication. At UW, I hope to contribute my distinct perspective on problem-solving alongside my engineering knowledge to collaborate with others through programs like Engineers Without Borders to create impactful solutions to universal problems.

In this essay, which is another strong response to the “Diversity” prompt , the student does a great job of explaining how being around different opinions has shaped their own perspective, as well as capturing the role they play within their family. The response highlights what the student has learned not just about their grandmothers’ opinions, but about listening in general and forming opinions of their own.

This essay is also a good reminder that writing a strong response to this kind of prompt doesn’t require you to focus on a distinct culture–you can write effectively about aspects of your identity, like the conversations at your family dinner table, that aren’t typically associated with diversity. So long as your growth and character are at the center of the story, like they are for this student, the essay will do a great job of demonstrating who you are to the admissions committee.

The other especially effective part of this essay is the end, where the author connects their theme to a specific program and future at UW. This detail goes above and beyond what the prompt asks for, to show admissions officers exactly how this student plans to participate in the University of Washington community. Although quick, this line drives home the relevance of this student’s skills and experience to UW’s values as an institution, which helps admissions officers picture them on campus.

While this kind of concrete connection to the school can take your essay to the next level, you want to be sure that you make the connection in a way that feels natural. The majority of your essay should focus on some aspect of your identity and what it reflects about your broader character–only mention something specific about the school if you have extra space, and it’s directly connected to what you’ve discussed. It’s always nice to have a cherry on top of an already strong essay, but ultimately the most important thing is always to answer what the prompt is actually asking.

What Could Be Improved

Overall, this is a super strong essay, with very little to improve. The only thing that we would consider changing is the time periods the student chooses their examples from. While the anecdotes are strong and paint a vivid picture of a conflict that goes back years, stories from when the author was eight may seem less relevant to an admissions committee that is looking to admit that student ten years later.

If you have a story that dates back to your childhood, you should weigh the benefits of starting at the very beginning of the story against the benefits of including anecdotes that show how you behave in that community now. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all rule here: simply be conscious about the choices you make with your essay, to ensure you communicate your key points as effectively as possible.

Prompt: Consider two very different subjects you have previously studied; tell us how you imagine bringing those together at UW to engage with a pressing societal concern. This could be a local, national, or global concern.

In my youth, my mother helped instill a curiosity about the natural world in me. Her work in consulting regarding climate change and environmental systems made me question my direct and indirect impact. I delved into these interests further in high school by taking broad coursework in the sciences. In AP Biology, I was baffled by the reactions and transformation that occurred with simple manipulation. In AP Environmental Science, I was able to apply these biological processes to environmental concepts I noticed on the daily.

In my junior year, I took AP Economics, a class on the polar opposite spectrum from biological and environmental sciences. However, while studying economics, I was able to establish connections between economic and environmental concepts. My father, who has a grounded education in economics, helped me understand the links between these seemingly disparate subjects. The subjects were foundationally interlinked; simple ideas coincided, such as the tragedy of the commons and its relation to marginal analysis.

As I noticed these intersectional ties, I saw that addressing the impending climate crisis through an economic lens was necessary for implementable, impactful change. There were opportunities for the government to impact climate action— these included economic incentives and regulations to influence the market price, changing producer and consumer behavior to be environmentally friendly. These policies helped protect the welfare of not only the environment but also of individuals who are disproportionately affected by the climate crisis.

My interest in communication studies links to this; I hope to thoroughly understand these subjects in an interdisciplinary context to provide the means for others to do the same.

At UW, particularly in the Interdisciplinary Honors Program, I hope to conjoin my interests in economic policy, science, and communications to gain the leverage and sound academic foundation necessary to address these concerns.

One of the best things this essay did was make use of a simple structure. This prompt asks for a lot from students: discuss two interests, identify the relationship between the two interests, show that the relationship relates to a pressing societal concern , and describe how you will engage with that concern at UW. While it is possible to answer all of these questions with a creative structure, this student’s use of a simple structure helped keep all of the parts of the essay organized. The essay followed the same format as the prompt: two paragraphs about their interests and relationship between them, a paragraph on a societal concern, and two final paragraphs on how they will tie everything together at UW.

Utilizing this structure allowed the student to fully establish both of their interests as unique entities before combining them. Going into detail on what excited them about environmental science and economics in the first place made their genuine love for the topics shine through. Also, including specific concepts like biological reactions and tragedy of the commons shows this student’s knowledge in these respective fields, in addition to their passion.

This student also does a good job of explaining the relationship they see between environmental sciences and economics. Explaining how they were “foundationally interlinked; simple ideas coincided” gives some insight into how this student thinks. We learn that they used logic to connect seemingly different topics that share common ideas. Establishing this logic-based link helps us understand how they devised solutions to address the pressing issue of the climate crisis in the third paragraph. The reader is left with the impression this student is genuinely fascinated by these two topics and has an interest in continuing to combine them in the future.

This student struggles with the transition to discussing their future goals. Since they devoted a large portion of their allotted word count to their interests in science and economics, they were left with very few words to discuss their interest in communication and how all three fields can be tied together. This leaves the essay feeling rushed and less genuine at the end.

If they cut down on some words earlier in the essay—perhaps only mention their interest sparked from their coursework or their parents, rather than delving into detail on both—they could devote more space to their interest in communication studies later on. Then, this student could add more depth to the sentence “ My interest in communication studies links to this,” by replacing it with something like:

“As I have seen the importance of science and economics for saving our planet, I have realized that interdisciplinarity is what will save the world. Disparate fields must join together for change to occur. I plan to join the inherently interdisciplinary communication studies program to show the world the importance of communication between disciplines.”

Do you want feedback on your University of Washington essays? After rereading your essays countless times, it can be difficult to evaluate your writing objectively. That’s why we created our free Peer Essay Review tool , where you can get a free review of your essay from another student. You can also improve your own writing skills by reviewing other students’ essays.

If you want a college admissions expert to review your essay, advisors on CollegeVine have helped students refine their writing and submit successful applications to top schools. Find the right advisor for you to improve your chances of getting into your dream school!

The Ultimate Guide to Writing For The Washington Post

The Washington Post is in some ways a very traditional newspaper-style publication, and in other ways it is refreshingly modern.

Unlike many of the other publications I cover on this site – like The Guardian or Business Insider – The Washington Post makes their submission process fairly transparent. You can write several different kinds of content and pitch it to different sections, and have several good avenues for getting your credit on their pages.

First Up: Read the Site

Spend some time – a few weeks at minimum – reading content in the section you want to pitch. Pay attention to a few things.

When a post is political, what angle does it take? Does it lean more liberal or conservative? Is it explicit, or simply biased?
How much fact and how many sources are cited in the content? Are you expected to trust the author’s expertise, or read up further if you’re concerned?
What is the scope of the topics covered? Is it largely about global issues, national issues, or do local issues crop up as well?
What is the tone, perspective, and voice of the content? Should you write in a more personal style, or keep your content impersonal and factual?

Eventually you’ll gain a feel for the kind of content published on the Washington Post and you’ll be ready to start laying the groundwork for publication.

Developing a Frame of Mind

Read the Guidelines

At some point, you always need to track down whatever guidelines a site has for submission ahead of time.

Here’s the page for the Washington Post . Basically:

Don’t submit anything that’s inappropriate. No violence, no libel, no pornography, no violations of laws or privacy, no copyright violations, and so on. Importantly, no solicitation, no advertising, and no misrepresentation of your affiliations.
You give WaPo the rights to use content you submit.

It’s all fairly standard, and you can read through the whole thing in a few minutes. If you’ve submitted content to any site before, it’s pretty much the same stuff you’ve seen everywhere.

You should also read their rules about ethics and conflicts of interest. Most of this is aimed at journalists rather than freelance contributors, but it’s still worth giving a look, just in case.

Picking a Submission Method

There are several ways you can submit content and have it show up on the Washington Post itself. Let’s go over each of them.

The Washington Post also maintains a talent network. You can create a profile here . Not all profiles are accepted, though, so make sure to put your best foot forward.

With all of these different options available to you, how can you possibly lose?

Betty Schwimmer

Thank you! Submission guidelines to Perspective and Inspirations? How to find out who is in charge of each section? Thanks.

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Faculty & Staff

Freshman writing section

At the UW, we consider the college essay as our opportunity to see the person behind the transcripts and the numbers. Some of the best statements are written as personal stories. In general, concise, straightforward writing is best, and good essays are often 300-400 words in length.

Please note that the UW essay questions must be answered within our application. For the Common App, that means within our UW questions. We do not consider the Common App essay.

Essay prompt [required]

Tell a story from your life, describing an experience that either demonstrates your character or helped to shape it.

Maximum length : 650 words

Short response [required]

Our families and communities often define us and our individual worlds. Community might refer to your cultural group, extended family, religious group, neighborhood or school, sports team or club, co-workers, etc. Describe the world you come from and how you, as a product of it, might add to the diversity of the UW.

Maximum length : 300 words

Tip : Keep in mind that the UW strives to create a community of students richly diverse in cultural backgrounds, experiences, values and viewpoints.

Additional information about yourself or your circumstances [optional]

You are not required to write anything in this section, but you may include additional information if something has particular significance to you. For example, you may use this space if:

You have experienced personal hardships in attaining your education
Your activities have been limited because of work or family obligations
You have experienced unusual limitations or opportunities unique to the schools you attended

Maximum length : 200 words

Format for the essays

Content is important, but spelling, grammar and punctuation are also considered.
We recommend composing in advance, then copying and pasting into the application. Double-spacing, italics and other formatting will be lost, but this will not affect the evaluation of your application.
We’ve observed most students write a polished formal essay, yet submit a more casual short response. Give every part of the writing responses your best effort, presenting yourself in standard, formal English.
Proofread, proofread, proofread!

Tip : Write like it matters, not like you’re texting. This is an application for college, not a message to your friend. Get some hints in the video:

All writing in the application, including your essay/personal statement and short responses, must be your own work. Do not use another writer’s work and do not use artificial intelligence software (ChatGPT, Bard, etc.) to assist or write your statement.

Per Washington state law and University of Washington policy , all admissions staff are mandatory reporters of child abuse and neglect. Any statements in written materials that give admissions staff reasonable cause to believe abuse or neglect of someone under the age of 18 may have occurred must be reported to Child Protective Services or the police. Learn more about University reporting requirements .

If you or someone you know is a survivor of sexual assault or other sexual misconduct, RAINN is a national hotline that provides support and referrals. Call 800.656.4673 or visit the website for a chat option. For individuals who have experienced domestic violence or intimate partner violence, the National DV Hotline offers phone, chat, and text options for support.

A regular antidote to the mainstream media

Rebecca Gordon, Passing the Torch?

When is it my turn to retire? That question represents both a distinct kind of horror and a certain luxury. Yes, one day you can simply stop and, even if you’re lucky enough not to be in instant need, as aging TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon vividly reminds us today (says 80-year-old Tom Engelhardt), you undoubtedly face a potential crisis. Once upon a time, I couldn’t even have imagined such a crisis. It was something that belonged to my grandparents’ or parents’ generation and was inconceivable to me. Now, for Rebecca and so many other older people, myself included, that crisis looms and the question in this society is: once your “value” is gone, not just what do you do, but what are you (if anything at all)?

And keep in mind that we’re in an — excuse me for using the word this way — age (or era, if you prefer) in which one of the two candidates for president (and I know you won’t have the slightest doubt which one I’m thinking of) has been talking about the possibility of cutting Social Security and Medicare retirement benefits for retirees. And why not, since they hardly matter anymore, right? I mean, who cares about how comfortable life might be for the people who are no longer in the workforce and may not, in their own lives, have much force at all? (Keep in mind that an estimated 50% of older workers have nothing in the bank for retirement!)

Of course, that same candidate has been denouncing Kamala Harris for mistreating Mike Pence. Yes, Mike Pence! (“The way she treated Mike Pence was horrible. The way she treats people is horrible.”) Uh, I wonder who actually treated former Vice President Pence horribly? I can’t imagine, but I do have the feeling that, under the circumstances, the candidate I’ve just been writing about might consider retiring. Otherwise, should he somehow win in 2024, we may all have to retire. Sigh… And while you’re waiting, let Gordon take you on a little retirement voyage of her own. Tom

A Personal Meditation on Growing Old

The Washington Post headline reads : “A big problem for young workers: 70- and 80-year-olds who won’t retire.” For the first time in history, reports Aden Barton , five generations are competing in the same workforce. His article laments a “demographic traffic jam” at the apexes of various employment pyramids, making it ever harder for young people “to launch their careers and get promoted” in their chosen professions. In fact, actual professors (full-time and tenure-track ones, presumably, rather than part-timers like me) are Exhibit A in his analysis. “In academia, for instance,” as he puts it, “young professionals now spend years in fellowships and postdoctoral programs waiting for professor jobs to open.”

I’ve written before about how this works in the academic world, describing college and graduate school education as a classic pyramid scheme. Those who got in early got the big payoff — job security, a book-lined office, summers off, and a “sabbatical” every seven years (a concept rooted in the Jewish understanding of the sabbath as a holy time of rest). Those who came late to the party, however, have ended up in seemingly endless post-doctoral programs, if they’re lucky, and if not, as members of the part-time teaching corps.

Too Broke to Retire

For the most part, I’m sympathetic to Barton’s argument. There are too many people who are old and in the way at the top of various professional institutions — including our government (where an 81-year-old, under immense pressure, just reluctantly decided not to try for a second term as president, while a 77-year-old is still stubbornly running for that same office). But I think Barton misses an important point when he claims that “older workers are postponing retirement… because they simply don’t want to quit.” That may be true for high earners in white-collar jobs, but many other people continue working because they simply can’t afford to stop. Research described in Forbes magazine a few years ago showed that more than one-fifth of workers over age 55 were then among the working poor. The figure rose to 26% for women of that age, and 30% for women 65 and older. In other words, if you’re still working in your old age, the older you are, the more likely it is that you’re poor.

Older workers also tend to be over-represented in certain low-paying employment arenas like housecleaning and home and personal health care. As Teresa Ghilarducci reported in that Forbes article:

“Nearly one-third of home health and personal care workers are 55 or older. Another large category of workers employing a disproportionate share of older workers is maids and housekeeping cleaners, 29% of whom are 55 or older and 54% of whom are working poor. And older workers make up 34% of another hard job: janitorial services, about half of whom are working poor. (For a benchmark, 23% of all workers are 55 and up.)”

We used to worry about “ children having children .” Maybe now we should be more concerned about old people taking care of old people.

Why are so many older workers struggling with poverty? It doesn’t take a doctorate in sociology to figure this one out. People who can afford to retire have that option for a couple of reasons. Either they’ve worked in high-salary, non-physical jobs that come with benefits like 401(k) accounts and gold-plated health insurance. Or they’ve been lucky enough to be represented by unions that fight for their members’ retirement benefits.

However, according to the Pension Rights Center , a non-profit organization working to expand financial security for retirees, just under half of those working in the private (non-governmental) sector have no employment-based retirement plan at all. They have only Social Security to depend on, which provides the average retiree with a measly $17,634 per year, or not much more than you’d earn working full-time at the current federal minimum wage, which has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009. Worse yet, if you’ve worked at such low-paying jobs your entire life, you face multiple obstacles to a comfortable old age: pay too meager to allow you to save for retirement; lower Social Security benefits, because they’re based on your lifetime earnings; and, most likely, a body battered by decades of hard work.

Many millions of Americans in such situations work well past the retirement age, not because they “simply don’t want to quit,” but because they just can’t afford to do so.

On the Road Again

It’s autumn in an even-numbered year, which means I’m once again in Reno, Nevada, working on an electoral campaign, alongside canvassers from UNITE-HERE, the hospitality industry union. This is my fourth stint in Washoe County, this time as the training coordinator for folks from Seed the Vote , the volunteer wing of this year’s political campaign. It’s no exaggeration to say that, in 2022, UNITE-HERE and Seed the Vote saved the Senate for the Democrats, re-electing Catherine Cortez Masto by fewer than 8,000 votes — all of them here in Washoe County.

This is a presidential year, so we’re door-knocking for Kamala Harris, along with Jacky Rosen, who’s running for reelection to Nevada’s other Senate seat.

When I agreed to return to Reno, it was with a heavy heart. In my household, we’d taken to calling the effort to reelect Joe Biden “the death march.” The prospect of a contest between two elderly white men, the oldest ever to run for president, both of whom would be well over 80 by the time they finished a four-year term, was deeply depressing. While defeating Donald Trump was — and remains — an existential fight, a Biden-Trump contest was going to be hard for me to face.

Despite his age, Joe Biden has been an effective president in the domestic arena. (His refusal to take any meaningful action to restrain the Israeli military in Gaza is another story.) He made good use of Democratic strength in Congress to pass important legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act. That kitchen-sink law achieved many things, including potentially reducing this country’s greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by 2030, allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices directly with pharmaceutical companies (while putting a $2,000 annual cap on Medicare recipients’ outlays for drugs), and lowering the price of “Obamacare” premiums for many people.

Still, Biden’s advanced age made him a “ terrible, horrible, no good, very bad ” candidate for president. Admittedly, a win for 59-year-old Kamala Harris in Nevada won’t be a walk in the park, but neither will it be the death march I’d envisioned.

Old and In the Way?

Government, especially at the federal level, is clearly an arena where (to invert the pyramid metaphor) too many old people are clogging up the bottom of the funnel. Some of them, like House Speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi, remain in full possession of their considerable faculties. She’s also had the grace to pass the torch of Democratic leadership in the House to the very able (and much younger) Hakeem Jeffries, representing the 8th district of New York. Others, like former California Senator Dianne Feinstein, held on, to paraphrase Rudyard Kipling , long after they were gone. Had my own great heroine Ruth Bader Ginsberg had the grace to retire while Barack Obama was still president, we wouldn’t today be living under a Supreme Court with a six-to-three right-wing majority.

What about the situation closer to home? Have I also wedged myself into the bottom of the funnel, preventing the free flow of younger, more vigorous people? Or, to put the question differently, when is it my turn to retire?

I haven’t lived out the past three stints in Reno alone. My partner and I have always done them together, spending several months here working 18 hours a day, seven days a week. That’s what a campaign is , and it takes a lot out of you. I’m now 72 years old, while my partner is five years older. She was prepared to come to Reno again when we thought the contest would be Trump versus Biden. Once we knew that Harris would replace him, however, my partner felt enormous relief. Harris’s chances of beating Trump are — thank God — significantly better than Biden’s were. “I would have done it when it was the death march,” she told me, “but now I can be retired.”

Until Harris stepped up, neither of us could imagine avoiding the battle to keep Trump and his woman-hating, hard-right vice presidential pick out of office. We couldn’t face a Trump victory knowing we’d done nothing to prevent it. But now my 77-year-old partner feels differently. She’s at peace with retirement in a way that, I must admit, I still find hard to imagine for myself.

I haven’t taught a college class since the spring semester of 2021. For the last few years, I’ve been telling people, “I’m sort of retired.” The truth is that while you’re part of the vast army of contingent, part-time faculty who teach the majority of college courses, it’s hard to know when you’re retired. There’s no retirement party and no “emerita” status for part-timers. Your name simply disappears from the year’s teaching roster, while your employment status remains in a strange kind of limbo.

Admittedly, I’ve already passed a few landmarks on the road to retirement. At 65, I went on Medicare ( thank you, LBJ !), though I held out until I reached 70 before maximizing my Social Security benefits. But I find it very hard to admit to anyone (even possibly myself) that I’m actually retired, at least when it comes to working for pay.

For almost two decades I could explain who I am this way: “I teach ethics at the University of San Francisco.” But now I have to tell people, “I’m not teaching anymore,” before rushing to add, “but I’m still working with my union.” And it’s true. I’m part of a “kitchen cabinet” that offers advice to the younger people leading my part-time faculty union. I also serve on our contract negotiations team and have a small gig with my statewide union, the California Federation of Teachers. But this year I chose not to run for the policy board (our local’s decision-making body), because I think those positions should go to people who are still actually teaching.

Those small pieces of work are almost enough to banish the shame I’d feel acknowledging that I’m already in some sense retired. I suspect my aversion to admitting that I don’t work for pay anymore has two sources: a family that prized professional work as a key to life satisfaction and — despite my well-developed critique of capitalism – a continuing infection with the productivity virus: the belief that a person’s value can only be measured in hours of “productive” labor.

Under capitalism, a person who has no work — compensated or otherwise — can easily end up marginalized and excluded from meaningful participation in society. The political philosopher Iris Marion Young considered marginalization one of the most ominous forms of oppression in a liberal society. “Marginals,” she wrote, “are people the system of labor cannot or will not use,” a dangerous condition under which a “whole category of people is expelled from useful participation in social life and thus potentially subjected to severe material deprivation and even extermination.”

Even when people’s material needs are met, as is the case for the luckiest retirees in this country, they can suffer profound loneliness and an unsettling disconnection from the social structures in which meaningful human activity takes place. I suspect it’s the fear of this kind of disconnection that keeps me from acknowledging that I might one day actually retire.

Jubilation and Passing the Torch

The other fear that keeps me working with my union, joining political campaigns, and writing articles like this one is the fear of the larger threats we humans face. We live in an age of catastrophes, present or potential. These include the possible annihilation of democratic systems in this country, the potential annihilation of whole peoples ( Palestinians , for example, or Sudanese ), or indeed, the annihilation of our species, whether quickly in a nuclear war or more slowly through the agonizing effects of climate change.

But even in such an age, I suspect that it’s time for many of my generation to trust those coming up behind us and pass the torch. They may not be ready, but neither were most of us when someone shoved that cone of flame into our hands.

Still, if I can bring myself to let go and trust those coming after me, then maybe I’ll be ready to embrace the idea behind one of my favorite Spanish words. In that language, you can say, “I’m retired” (“ retirada” ), and it literally means “pulled back” from life. But in Spanish, I can also joyfully call myself “ jubilada , ” a usage that (like “sabbatical”) also draws on a practice found in the Hebrew scriptures, the tradition of the jubilee , the sabbath of sabbaths, the time of emancipation of the enslaved, of debt relief, and the return of the land to those who work it.

Maybe it’s time to proudly accept not my retirement, but my future jubilation. But not quite yet. We still have an election to win.

Featured image: my young angel is 98! by Luca is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0 / Flickr

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook . Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story , and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War , as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power , John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II , and Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story .

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